Hi y’all,

How have you been?  I have, unfortunately, been so extremely busy with work that I am writing this newsletter fully a week and a half after I intended to. 

About two weeks ago, I told you all that Wil Wheaton had podcasted “The Glass City,” a story I’m incredibly proud of.

Today, I want to let you know that he followed that up with an hour-long interview with me on It's Storytime with Wil Wheaton (the link to the interview is on Spotify, but the link to the podcast has links to a bunch of podcast platforms).  We talked about the story and about my approaches to writing, and I got the chance to shout out a few of the people who were instrumental in the process of writing the story and in my development as a writer.

Wil and his producer Gabrielle were extremely generous with the interview.  Something we talked about in the context of “The Glass City” was this sort of deep loneliness, which I think is the emotional heart of the story, and writing and publishing short fiction (as with many kinds of art) can be a very lonely endeavor.  In the face of that, for me, writing is a bid for connection.  It’s taking the things I can’t say directly and putting them in another form.  Dreaming up a whole different world to get across one specific feeling—so that I can turn to the rest of humanity, or at least the minuscule fraction of humanity that reads my work, and say, do you know what I mean?  Is it like this for you too?

I think what I’m trying to say is that it usually feels like nobody is speaking back (except those of you who occasionally reply to this newsletter, and bless all of you a thousand times over).  Nobody is saying yes, I heard you; yes, I know what you mean.  Hell, nobody is even saying hmm, not really sure what you’re on about, honestly.  So this interview, in which Wil asked me really thoughtful questions about my story, questions that came from having read it and thought about it and connected with it, was… I mean, it was amazing.  It was sort of mind-blowing.  In some ways, it was just what I’ve always hoped for.

I’m just as vain and self-interested as anyone, obviously.  I desperately hope that the interview was interesting and that I sounded cool and smart.  I hope that I eventually grow out of the vocal habit of cutting myself off halfway through a sentence and just assuming that the rest of it was understood, a thing I only learned that I do by listening to this interview.  I hope some more people will want to read or listen to my work as a result of it.

But I’m also just so delighted to have gotten the chance to do it.  I hope that the podcast continues to do well and continues shining a light on speculative short fiction.  They’re doing such excellent work, and I’ve been honored to be a part of it.

If you give it a listen, let me know what you think!

Short Story Log

I recently read “The Dragonfly” by Luna Hou in Uncanny Magazine and was really struck by it.  The prose is wonderful, and the story is straightforward and emotionally potent and extremely beautiful.  It’s a story about a character in a situation that I’ve basically been hoping to never be in since I was about 15, so I was, perhaps, particularly susceptible to its charms.

Just this afternoon, I read “Roams the Planet of Our Grief” by Natalia Theodoridou in Clarkesworld.  I’ve been a fan of Natalia’s stories for years, and this one was haunting (uh, literally) and beautiful.  The narrator is one of my favorite types—someone driven by desires beyond his comprehension—and the world sketched out at the heart of the story and in its background is one I’m going to keep thinking about.

Love,

AnaMaria